All morning long I was racking my brains for the rest of that quote. The first line popped into my head as a defense against the implications of what I was about to do. Go to mass.

We’re at my in-laws and Old Mother Blonde expects us to go to church when we’re here with the same certainty of our complying as with her expectation that the grandchildren will pose willingly for a group portrait after dinner. It’s part of the holiday festivities. Not wanting to cause trouble, the grandchildren pose and even smile and I go to church. I even smile.

“When holy and devout religious Mannions…”

I refused to Google it. Somewhere in my mental attic I had it on file and it would come to me.

It didn’t. I went to church still stuck. And not smiling.

The mass was crowded. Easter Sunday, after all. Standing room only and I can’t stand these days, so I had an excuse to retreat to the back of the church and sit (on the floor) in a corner of the entrance hall where, as it happened, a statue of the risen Jesus smiled sadly down upon me with the same look mixing sadness and compassion he gave Thomas the Apostle when he offered the notorious doubter what he’d said he wanted:

While I was sitting there---not doubting because I don’t doubt, I know. It didn’t happen.---a young guy, maybe twenty, East Indian, very dark, with a thick thatch of black hair as neatly combed as hair that thick will allow itself to be before breaking the teeth out of the comb, tall, thin, in gray flannel slacks and white Oxford shirt, stepped up to the statue with his iPhone ready to take a picture.

He took a picture.

He took another.

He leaned back and turned the phone to the horizontal and took another couple of pictures.

And I asked myself, What the hell is he taking a picture of? By which I meant why is he taking a picture of this statue? It’s not an ugly statue but it’s hardly a great work of art.

Maybe, I thought, he’s about to text an Easter greeting to someone.

Maybe, I thought, he’s proving to a friend who’d bet otherwise that he actually did go to church.

Maybe, I thought, he also recognized that the sculptor was referencing the story of Doubting Thomas and found it as amusing as I did. After all, the statue greets everybody who comes into the church through the front doors with the same offer as He made Thomas and, for those who are up on their Scripture, the line, “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.” Pretty ironic way to welcome the faithful to mass.

Maybe, I thought, he’s a blogger and has had an idea for a post.

Maybe, I thought, he just thinks it’s a pretty picture to send as a virtual post card.

Finally, though, I thought, Or maybe it means something to him.

By it, I mean all of it. The Crucifixion, the Resurrection, the doubt, the faith. Jesus.

And, Jesus, I thought, I miss that. That being it meaning something to me. I miss that. I miss coming into church on an Easter Sunday believing that it all happened. The Crucifixion. The Resurrection. Thomas’ doubting. Him.

I miss Him.

And it makes me sad to say that it would take seeing the print of the nails in his hands to make me believe again.

But there’s this consolation.

You don’t have to believe in Jesus to believe in him.

He had a pretty simple and straight-forward message that’s hard to argue with.

Love one another.

Happy Easter.

By the way…

It’s not Keats. It’s Shakespeare.

“When holy and devout religious men are at their beads tis hard to draw them thence, so sweet is zealous contemplation.”

Back at Barnes & Noble. Three artistic and intellectul looking women in their early twenties are discussing their flirtation techniques, telling horror stories, exchanging pointers. One, a brunette with long henna-ed curls and a striking profile, wearing a leather flight jacket, a brightly colored scarf that reaches below her waist, and clay-colored ankle boots with very high heels, says:

“I’m really bad at flirting. I feel like when I flirt with guys it either comes off like I hate them or I want to take them home and wear their skin.”

At Barnes & Noble. Heavy-set guy in his thirties with a grown-out goatee that reaches almost to his chest and a shirt that won’t stay buttoned over his belly. A computer programmer as it happens, judging by his conversation with two women and another man at the table by the window:

“Thanks to my foster brother, I’ll never be the bad son. I may not be the good son. That would be my other brother. But I’m not the bad son. I occupy a sort of happy middle ground. No one calls me up for favors, but they don’t sit there shaking their finger at me at Christmas.”

There’s a saying that all roads lead to Ankh-Morpork, greatest of Discworld cities.

At least, there’s a saying that there’s a saying that all roads lead to Ankh-Morpork.

And it’s wrong. All roads lead away from Ankh-Morpork, but sometimes people just walk along them the wrong way.

Poets long ago gave up trying to describe the city. Now the more cunning ones try to excuse it. They say, well, maybe it is smelly, maybe it is overcrowded, maybe it is a bit like Hell would be if they shut off the fires and stabled a herd of incontinent cows there for a year, but you must admit it is full of sheer, vibrant, dynamic life. And this is true, even if it is poets that are saying it. But people who aren’t poets say, so what? Mattresses tend to be full of life too, and no one writes odes to them. Citizens hate living there and, if they have to away on business or adventure or, more usually, until some statute of limitations runs out, can’t wait to get back so they can enjoy hating living there some more. They put stickers on the backs of their carts saying “Anhk-Morpork---Loathe It or Leave It.” ----from Moving Pictures by Terry Pratchett.

Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman), trying to decide if he’ll join the dwarves’ quest to recover their kingdom and their gold, reads the “standard” contract and discovers a clause absolving the dwarves of liability in case of incineration by dragon, in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, the first installment of Peter Jackson’s planned three-part adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s classic novel.

I’m not sure how detailed a map of Middle Earth J.R.R. Tolkien had drawn in his head when he sat down to write The Hobbit or how deeply he expected to explore the terrain or how minutely he planned to chronicle its history. I believe he had the stories that became The Lord of the Rings percolating but I don’t know if he yet knew where he would take them or where they would take him. But The Hobbit is written as if he meant it as a one-off. And it’s written for a different audience than the trilogy would be aimed at. The Hobbit is a children’s book, with plenty of nods and winks to adults who might be reading along and aloud. In fact, the primary intended audience sometimes seems to be adults reading it at bedtime and Tolkien seems to be directing them on how to tell the story. At any rate, it’s meant to be read out loud (but not loudly), and that’s how I got to know Bilbo Baggins, Gandalf the Gray, Gollum, Smaug, Thorin Oakenshield, the Shire, the Lonely Mountain, and the less terrifying precincts of Middle Earth west of Mordor. One night, when I was ten and we were on vacation on Cape Cod, in a back room of the house we were renting, with the black ocean spreading out towards a chain of lights on the horizon that was all we could see of Provincetown across the bay, Pop Mannion started to read to us The Hobbit.

I can still hear Pop reading the song the dwarves sing as they clean up after helping themselves to a supper that cleans out Bilbo’s pantries, cupboards, cellars, and larders (and how Hobbit-like is it that Bilbo’s house must be described in terms of pantries, cupboards, cellars, and larders plural?) :

Chip the glasses and crack the plates! Blunt the knives and bend the forks! That's what Bilbo Baggins hates— Smash the bottles and burn the corks!

Cut the cloth and tread on the fat! Pour the milk on the pantry floor! Leave the bones on the bedroom mat! Splash the wine on every door!

Dump the crocks in a boiling bowl; Pound them up with a thumping pole; And when you’ve finished if any are whole, Send them down the hall to roll!

And because that song in Pop’s voice is still in my ears, I can tell you that that scene, where Thorin Oakenshield’s company takes over Bilbo’s house for the night, or at least that part of the scene, is one of the many things Peter Jackson got very right in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, the first installment of what will eventually be a three-part adaptation of Tolkien’s book.

Whether you’ll agree with me or not depends on how your father or your mother or your big brother or sister or your teacher or you read it to you.

Ok. It’s too long. Two hours and forty-nine minutes, and that only brings us to page 122 of my edition of the book. (That’s a spoiler. Don’t look it up.) It’s padded. It drags. The pacing is off. The editing is sloppy. Things that should have needed only a single shot, get five. If you remember the book well, you’ll wonder why things you know are going to happen are taking so long to happen. If you don’t remember from the book, you’ll wonder what everybody’s waiting around for. The first visit to Rivendell isn’t dream-like, it’s soporific. It’s good to see Hugo Weaving as Elrond again but Jackson asks nothing of Cate Blanchett making a return appearance as Galadriel but that she stand there radiating light while he seems to expect we’ll respond to this vision with more awe and reverence than Bernadette showed at Lourdes.

Scenes and images and lines of dialog meant to evoke and foreshadow episodes from The Lord of the Rings seem only to repeat them. Most of the dwarves are interchangeable. The stone giants look and fight like Rock’em Sock’em Robots. Worst of all, the trolls are a botch, their scene played for laughs that just aren’t there.

I loved it. My family had to drag me out of the theater or I’d have sat straight through it again. I can’t wait to go back.

Like I said, much will depend on what from your first reading of The Hobbit you still hear in your heads, but if you go and are watching anything on the screen instead of Martin Freeman, you aren’t watching the movie.

The first smart thing Jackson did in making The Hobbit was cast Freeman as Bilbo and he and Freeman together have taken a long first step towards making Bilbo not just the hero of this trilogy but one of the heroes of the next one. I should say the previous one, but I suspect in the future fans won’t think of them that way.

I think that there’s a good chance, assuming that the next two movies aren’t just more of the same, that Freeman will be to the Lord of the Rings what Ewan McGregor is now to the original Star Wars, a star presence both felt and missed. Maybe even more so. I think it’s the case that Obi-wan is now McGregor’s Obi-wan and he isn’t playing a young Alec Guinness in the prequels, Guinness is playing an old Ewan McGregor in the sequels. Bilbo is now Freeman’s Bilbo, and although I don’t think audiences mind at all that it’s Guinness as the old Obi-wan, in the future, poor Ian Holm will probably disappoint audiences by not being Martin Freeman in a white wig. I’m not sure what effect it’ll have on audiences’ feelings about Elijah Wood’s Frodo, but probably they’ll be saying to themselves, “Bilbo would have handled that one better.”

Freeman is on his way to being to fantasy-adventure epics what Daniel Day-Lewis is to historical dramas.

And Andy Serkis is his Tommy Lee Jones.

Too much?

I’ll try to rein it in.

Freeman’s Bilbo is very much a hobbit divided against himself. Gandalf has volunteered him for the dwarves’ quest on the grounds that he is a Took on his mother’s side and from her has inherited a taste and a talent for adventure. But he thinks of himself as his father’s son, a Baggins of Bag End, and from that side of the family he’s inherited as a principle a love for staying at home and minding one’s own business. But we can see the argument between the two sides of him going on in his head. It’s there in his eyes, whatever he’s up to, a look of self-accusation coupled with self-doubt. The Took in him pushes him forward. The Baggins holds him back. But whichever side is winning at the moment, the other is there watching with angry disapproval.

It’s not just in his eyes. It’s in his whole body. When he runs, his legs, pure Took, are well-ahead of his Baggins shoulders and it’s a contest---is the Took going to pull him onward or will the Baggins haul him back? It turns out, both sides win, and that’s what saves him and his friends time and time again. The bold and adventurous Took in him takes him into situations where he’s needed to be a hero and the practical Baggins in him then figures out how best to get out of it. This makes him both brave and smart. He is the thinking-est Hobbit around and it’s why it takes four Hobbits to take his place in The Lord of the Rings. When Frodo or Sam or Merry or Pippin pick up a sword---or in Sam’s case a frying pan---it’s emotional. They’re reacting out of love or fear or outrage and there’s a desperate, forlorn hope to their charges into battle. But Bilbo never makes a move that isn’t intended to get him safely back to Bag’s End.

The roots of his heroism are his intelligence, his courage, and his complete and principled determination not to have to be a hero. Freeman’s Bilbo is a swashbuckler in spite of himself.

He’s also funny.

There’s much more lightheartedness and humor in The Hobbit than in Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, which is a matter of course. But while there are plenty of jokes, wisecracks, and moments of slapstick, the wit and the truest laughs belong to Freeman. His timing is brilliant and he can put a spin on any line or find a bump or a groove in it and make it sound as scathing, as revealing, and as full of irony as Hamlet’s best one-liners, keeping in mind that Hamlet is Shakespeare’s best and most ruthless comedian and that I’m inclined to exaggerate for emphasis.

As was probably clear up above, The Hobbit is a special book in my memory because it’s also a special event in my life. And as such it lives in my heart apart from The Lord of the Rings, which I read on my own only a couple of years later, all three books in a week when I was home sick from school, which makes them a different, separate special event. If I’d never read a word by J.R.R. Tolkien after Bilbo handed Gandalf the tobacco jar, The Hobbit would still be as wonderful and important in my memory and I’d have no inkling I was missing out on anything or that my understanding of the story was incomplete. I would never have known that the most important scene---as opposed to the best scene, which it happens to be---was Bilbo’s pocketing of the ring.

This is an accident of circumstance, but it’s possible because The Hobbit doesn’t present itself as a prequel. It’s complete unto itself, without even an implied To be continued at the end. If the narrator knows he’s telling the first chapter of a much longer story to come, he doesn’t let on. So I would guess that this is where a lot of young readers have stopped, with Bilbo safe at home, his armor donated to the museum, Sting hung up over the mantle, and the ring a secret treasure put well out of the way, and it’s only adventurous readers with some Took in them who find their way back to the Shire to start reading The Fellowship of the Ring.

At least, I would guess this is the way it went until Peter Jackson came along.

The novel The Hobbit stood and can still stand on its own in a way the movie was never going to be able to. The primary audience for the movie is fans of Jackson’s trilogy. Jackson had to take into account that most of the people buying tickets for The Hobbit would be expecting to see a prequel. That didn’t mean he had to make it as prequel. He could have made it as if it was simply an adaptation of The Hobbit as Tolkien originally published it, as a story complete unto itself. But that’s not what he decided to do. The thing is, he apparently decided not to make it as a prequel either.

What he’s doing is finishing his Lord of the Rings movie by finally getting around to making the beginning.

A lot of what happens in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey isn’t there to advance the plot of Bilbo’s adventures but to set up the story and the themes of The Lord of the Rings. So, much of what feels like padding and is padding is intended as exposition and much of what looks like recapitulation is meant to be introduction. It helps, then, if you know where Jackson’s going but can make yourself forget you’ve already been there.

Note, I called Jackson’s Lord of the Rings a movie, singular. Remember he filmed them all of a piece and they can be watched---if you have the time and the endurance---all at one go. And Jackson intends that in the future the marathon will begin with The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. At the moment most people are finding their way to The Hobbit by way of (a long way around now. It’s hard to believe The Fellowship was released eleven years ago!) The Lord of the Rings. But it won’t be long before most people are finding their way into The Lord of the Rings by way of The Hobbit: There and Back Again.

Jackson has set up some big challenges for himself. First, he has to compete with Tolkien again. But, second, this time out he has to compete with himself, a tough order, because there was no way he could top his most significant achievement in The Lord of the Rings, bringing Middle Earth to life on the screen. And here’s where I think Jackson has been very smart. He hasn’t tried to top himself here because he knows---or hopes---that future audiences will see him as topping himself in there, that is, in The Lord of the Rings.

I, seeing The Hobbit in 2012, might be a bit disappointed in Goblin-Town because I can’t help comparing it to the Mines of Moria, but my grandchildren in 2032 will see Moria as an intensification of what went on in Goblin-Town.

Then there’s the problem of style and tone. Tolkien’s Hobbit is a very different kind of book from his Lord of the Rings, and not just in its being a children’s book. The Hobbit is told as if it’s a folktale or a fairy tale and Bilbo’s literary brothers and sisters include Simple, Jack the Giant Killer, Aladdin, Snow White, and Belle. The Lord of the Rings is modeled on the great epics and romances. Aragorn is pretty much a reiteration of King Arthur. And, never mind the Brothers Grimm, fairy tales are comedies. They work their way towards weddings and “they all lived happily ever after” while the endings of epics and romances are usually something along the lines of “…and the good king died.”

And The Hobbit is a treasure hunt while The Lord of the Rings is a chase. Treasure hunts don’t always have happy endings, but most do and that makes them intrinsically hopeful. And while chases often end with the characters you’re rooting for to get away getting way, the possibility that they won’t gives the chases an air of dread. Jackson has set himself the job of being true to the spirit and story of Tolkien’s The Hobbit while making it fit together with his own version of The Lord of the Rings. He appears to be going about this by slowly blending the one into the other and we won’t know how well this is working until probably at least halfway through the next installment, The Desolation of Smaug. In An Unexpected Journey, it’s only just begun to be sorted out.

There’s one more problem Jackson’s inherited from Tolkien. There just aren’t enough interesting characters to fill out an epic. Besides Bilbo, there’s Gandalf, Gollum, and Smaug, and that’s about it. Unless you count the trolls, Tom, Bert, and William. I’ve never been a fan of Beorn but he’s not in An Unexpected Journey, anyway, and Smaug’s big scenes are yet to come. Which gives Jackson only a handful of performances to build his movie around.

Freeman carries the day, as I’ve said. But Ian McKellen’s Gandalf is a welcome, reassuring, and grounding presence. And Andy Serkis has done a fine job of showing us Gollum before he was changed by the loss of the Ring. Here he’s a more confident, happier creature---happy being a relative and subjective term---driven more by whim and malice and appetite than by obsession and hate. He’s less wheedling, less cringing, more clever in some ways but because he’s not focused on anything in particular except his next meal, more manipulatable than manipulative. Otherwise…

A little of Sylvester McCoy’s dotty wizard Radagast the Brown goes a long way and unfortunately we don’t get a little of him. Barry Humphries’ Great Goblin is amusing, to a point, but that point gets crossed quickly. And as I said, most of the dwarves are interchangeable. This might get fixed over the course of the next two films, but in this one Aidan Turner and Dean O’Gorman as Kili and Fili stand out only by being twin stand-ins for Legolas, Ken Stott’s Balin is the wise old man who has seen too much but still can’t help hoping, and James Nesbitt gets laughs as the company’s resident wiseacre, ironist, and happy-go-lucky fatalist.

No, I haven’t forgotten him.

Thorin Oakenshield, the leader of the dwarves.

It’s curious to contemplate, but Richard Armitage may be establishing himself as a romantic male lead by playing a character close to two feet shorter than he is in real life and a few hundred years older. As Thorin, he is bold, energetic, commanding, firm of purpose, dashing and even handsome in a grim and glowering way, every bit the king he was born to be, except in his lack of humility and in his being unable to separate his pride from his responsibility. And if the blending of The Hobbit into The Fellowship of the Ring is underway, it’s happening through Thorin, who’s looking to be the thematic precursor to Boromir, the heroic captain of Gondor who comes tragically close to betraying Frodo and taking the Ring from him. Boromir thinks he wants the ring to save his people. What he wants is the glory of having saved them. Boromir’s sin is mixing up duty with ambition. It must be remembered that the Ring doesn’t corrupt by putting ideas into anyone’s head. It corrupts by offering the ambitious the power to realize desires already at work corrupting them. Hobbits are resistant---but not immune---because they are naturally less ambitious than other folk. But ambition, vanity, and the desire for power are corruptions that don’t need the Ring to wreak their havoc. In An Unexpected Journey, the other dwarves are in a comic folktale. But Armitage makes us feel the gravity of his anger and ambition pulling them into his tragedy.

One of the themes of Tolkien’s The Hobbit is Bilbo’s resistance to that pull. It will be interesting to see how that works itself out in Jackson’s next two installments.

So…again, yes. There’s too much there there. Enough to make me wish that the DVD includes an un-extended edition. But amidst the clutter and confusion, what’s also there, in spirit and essence, is The Hobbit, mainly but not exclusively in the person of Martin Freeman, and that’s enough for me. It carried me back to the book and to the Shire and to that night on Cape Cod and to the moment when Pop Mannion began to read:

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit hole, and that means comfort…

Only this time I know what’s coming and that the best scene, which is the best scene, is also the most important scene…

Viewers advisory: We saw the movie in 2D shown at the old-fashioned rate of 24 frames per second. 3D gives me headaches and there’s no IMAX version showing nearby. But from what I’ve gathered from reading reviews and comments elsewhere, I think the 2D version may be best. What about you?

Not exactly a spring-like morning here in Mannionville. 36 degrees and it’s not supposed to get much over 40. But it’s the fourth day in a row with sunshine. The snow from early in the week hasn’t melted away, but there are patches of grass here and there, and there’s nothing heavy predicted. Over in Massachusetts, though, things haven’t been near as mild. Winter just won’t give up. A friend of Uncle Merlin who lives on Cape Cod sent along this photo from yesterday morning. Orleans, MA. Friday. March 22, 2013.

Our guide at the Edward Hopper House Thursday was a sweet-voiced, bohemian-looking woman in a cardigan with a gray page boy. She was quietly determined that we would get the most out of our visit, despite the upstairs rooms being off-limits and there being not much left to see. Hence the tour of the bathroom. Not going to guess how old she was, but old enough that she knew Hopper, not well but well enough to say hello to in passing. She was on more familiar terms with Hopper’s sister, who actually owned the house, Hopper coming to town on visits. Hopper died in 1967 and she described herself as being “very young” then which I took to mean she was a teenager or even in her early twenties. Not a little girl, at any rate.

She was a little girl when she first met him though. She grew up in Nyack and used to see him coming and going all the time, although she only recalled one conversation with him for us.

People always called him an old grouch, she told us, but she never thought so. Hopper’s sister used to like to sit on her front porch with her Siamese cat and our guide would often stop when she was out running errands or heading over to a friend’s house to chat and pet the cat. One day while she was there Hopper came out of the house. I’d didn’t ask but I’d like to think this happened when she was still a girl so I can imagine the big, lugubrious, typically glowering Hopper, a large, less than jovial presence, towering over her. But he smiled and said hello and the three of them spent some time discussing their mutual fondness for cats.

After that, whenever anyone said to our guide that Hopper was a grump, she would smile and say sweetly, “Obviously, you never talked to him about cats.”

Photo of Hopper in his Greenwich Village studio circa 1939 courtesy of Carnegie Museum of Art via the Smithsonian Art Museum.

Thursday. March 21, 2013. Nyack, New York. Front hall of the Edward Hopper House. On the right hand wall are a series of photographs by Charles Sternaimolo laying out side by side many of Hopper’s paintings with the scenes and places depicted in them as they look today. Click on the photo to see some examples.

Took Young Ken down to Nyack yesterday so he could visit the Edward Hopper House to do some research for a project for his art class. Hopper was born in the house and grew up there and he visited on and off all his life, but it was really his parents’ and then his sister’s home. Interesting and informative visit but a bit disappointing. Wasn’t expecting to see any of Hopper’s major works there, but I thought they’d have some paintings by him, and they do, but they’re upstairs in rooms that are rented out as studios and none of the artists currently renting them were there to give us permission to look in. We did get to see the upstairs bathroom, though, which hasn’t been remodeled. It’s as Hopper would have always known it. The volunteer showing us around says she’s always amazed when she looks at the cast-iron bathtub. She wonders how he fit. It doesn’t look long enough. Hopper, it turns out, was six-four, a fact that impressed Young Ken, who is only six-three and a half. Never thought about Hopper’s height before but now that I know I can see it in his photos. He was a big-boned, rangy-looking guy.

This is the bike of a tall man.

So no paintings by Hopper but almost as good were the ghosts of some of his paintings. He sometimes used parts of the house itself as inspiration and background. Click on the photos to see the paintings they found their way into. Right click to see the photos themselves enlarged.

This is a corner of the front porch.

Here’s the view down the stairway to the front hall.

This fireplace is in what is now the office.

And this place isn’t part of the house, it’s up the street a few blocks.

So that was cool. And although we didn’t get to look at any of Hopper’s paintings, there were some drawings and family photographs about and there were paintings by other artists. Two downstairs rooms are used as a gallery and paintings by three contemporary abstract artists were on display. Ken particularly liked the work of Robert Straight and decided on the spot to switch his paper topic from Hopper to Straight.

At the restaurant---a real restaurant, with a heart and a soul and a lively clientele and busy staff, unlike Gus’ Joint---there’s a band crammed over in a corner of the crowded dining room murdering mellow rock hits from the 70s. Van Morrison should sue for what they’re doing to Brown-eyed Girl. Four middle-aged guys in button-down shirts and dress slacks. This doesn’t appear to be a statement. I suspect they came here straight from their day jobs. The guitarist, drummer, and lead singer I take to be science teachers at the local high school. The bassist is one of the other three’s older brother who’s a personal injury attorney. The lawyer-bassist is short with wiry salt and pepper hair and glasses. He’s still wearing his suit pants and white shirt and tie but he’s taken off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves, ready to rock out.

They’re loud. They’re enthusiastic. They’re…not very good.

So far I haven’t recognized a single song by the tune, only by the lyrics.

The blonde thinks I’m being harsh. “Come on,” she says, “They’re all probably somebody’s husband.” The dinner is a fundraiser. The waiters and waitresses are all volunteers, local “celebrities”---TV and radio show personalities, executives at high profile companies with headquarters in the area, politicians, doctors from the nearby hospital---overseen by the regular wait staff who are also volunteering their time. All tips are being donated to the cause. So the guys in the band probably are somebodies’ husbands. I think that would be a good name for their band too.

The Four Somebodies’ Husbands.

Three women in their late forties, early fifties get up from their table and start to dance. Somebodies’ Wives? They’re led by a small redhead in black who has the moves and knows all the words. She lip-synchs as she dances, complete with expressions and gestures.

Now the attorney-bassist has taken off his tie and unbuttoned his shirt and he’s doing the forehead to forehead thing with the lead guitarist Steve Van Zandt and the Boss like to do. Back in college somebody must have told the lead singer---short, bald, gray goatee---he did a good Springsteen and he’s showing it off on 10th Avenue Freeze-out.

Stopped at a red light on the road south of here. Over on our right: Gus’ Restaurant. Blocky building of dingy red brick. Weathered, free-standing sign, leaning on its posts. No curtains, no signs, no decorations in either of the two plate-glass windows that look in blankly on what appears to be a mostly empty dining room. No tables that we could see, no customers at dinner. No waiters or waitresses bustling about. Spot only a single person inside. Tall silhouette standing against the bar, holding a pool cue by his side.

"I don’t think Gus is truly making the effort,” I observe to the blonde.

Here’s Part Three. One more part to follow. Part One is here. Part Two here.

Backing up here to get a running start at catching up with where I left off at the end of Part One.

Generally, people don’t argue the facts. Or with the facts or to get at the facts. We don’t even argue ideas. We argue in favor or our opinions. We champion what we already believe, and it’s usually the case that we believe something because it confirms something else we need to believe, usually that “I’m right to think what I think and live as I live.”

Read a blogger or a pundit approvingly citing a “new study” and you’re probably reading a sentence that should have been written more honestly as “Here’s a study that proves everything I already know about how the world works is right, so there!”

Or to put it another way. We’re in the habit of believing what we need to believe in order to justify what we want to do.

But beyond that, an awful lot of what we know we know we don’t really know. There isn’t even anything there to know. It’s just something we think. It’s something we picked up somewhere and let stick in our heads, and we continue to think it only because we’ve never thought about it since we first thought it---we haven’t bothered to re-submit it to any tests against the facts---or because it’s convenient to think it. It’s as I just said. It confirms something else we know we know.

I just finished reading Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden--from 9/11 to Abbottabad by Peter Bergen. It’s a pretty good book, well-written, informative, factual, or at least I trust that it is factual. Bergen has a good reputation as a journalist. His previous books on al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden were well-received and, as far as I know, haven’t been shown up as bunk. And Manhunt tracks with other things I’ve read on the subject, including Mark Bowden’s The Finish: The Killing of Osama Bin Laden, which I read just before starting Manhunt.

So, I was reading along with interest, trusting I was getting the facts, enjoying the book as history, journalism, and an adventure story, when I ran headlong into this, Bergen’s explanation for why a Democratic President seemed as aggressive and determined about the use of force as only Republican Presidents are supposed to be:

Perhaps [President Obama’s] views on national security had to do with when he came of age. Obama was the first major American politician in decades whose views about national security weren’t deeply informed by what he did or didn’t do in Vietnam. Too young to have served in Vietnam as the senators John McCain and John Kerry did, he was also too young to have avoided service in Vietnam as Dick Cheney, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush had. For Obama, Vietnam was a nonissue, and it is possible this fact contributed to his greater use to his willingness to use military power in comparison to an older generation of Democrats. It took Clinton two years to intervene in Bosnia, which was on the verge of genocide, whereas it took Obama only a week or so to intervene in Libya in the spring of 2011, when dictator Moammar Gadhafi threatening large-scale massacres of his own population.

At first glance, this might come across as plausible but commonplace. After all, we know that not just liberals but the U.S. Military high command was traumatized by the war in Southeast Asia. “No More Vietnams” became not just a rallying cry for antiwar protesters. It became part of the basis of our foreign policy. It is, essentially, the Powell Doctrine.

But two things pulled me up short here.

A flash of memory and a longstanding prejudice.

Here’s the prejudice: Any use of events or issues from the 1960s to explain anything, including events and issues from the 1960s, is pure shinola.

I’m not about to defend that. I don’t recommend it. I’m not apologizing for it either. It’s just one of those things I think without thinking. What matters is that it made me stop reading and start arguing.

What are you saying, Bergen? Shadows of Vietnam were why it took Bill Clinton two years to send troops into Bosnia?

And Bush’s policy was based on several factors, including that, unlike his son, the first President Bush wasn’t keen to wage one war on top of another---he didn’t want to commit U.S. troops and resources to another war so soon after the Gulf War--- but mainly on Bosnia’s being seen as a Europe’s problem and it’s being up to the Europeans to solve it. The Europeans were saying so themselves. The UN was brought in, but NATO was to stay out of it, so that we’d stay out of it, so that the Russians would stay out of it. It wasn’t Vietnam that was weighing on people’s minds. It was World War III.

That’s what I remember. Not what I know. I know what Bill Clinton says decided his approach to Bosnia, because I looked it up in his autobiography:

My own options were constrained by the dug-in positions when I took office. For instance, I was reluctant to go along with Senator Dole in unilaterally lifting the arms embargo, for fear of weakening the United Nations (though we later did so in effect by declining to enforce it). I also didn’t want to divide the NATO alliance by unilaterally bombing Serb military positions, especially since there were European, but no American soldiers on the ground with the UN mission. And I didn’t want to send American troops there, putting them in harm’s way under a UN mandate I thought was bound to fail.

Sounds to me as though Clinton wanted to send in our troops right away and that what took two years was not his having to exorcise any ghosts of Vietnam that might have haunted him but his having to untangle the diplomatic knots created before he took office. Once that was taken care of and Bosnia became a NATO operation, we went right in.

What’s more, a few years later, when Kosovo was on the brink of genocide, the only thing that slowed Clinton’s decision to send our bombers into the air was resistance from the Republicans who controlled Congress. By this point, all the GOP cared about was running Clinton out of town.

As for Vietnam being a nonissue for President Obama, that may or may not be so. What is so is that his administration’s military strategy in Libya was modeled on Clinton’s success over Kosovo.

It’s a theme of Bowden’s The Finish, in which Bowden is generally admiring of the President’s decision-making in dealing with al Qaeda and going after bin Laden, that he’s been able to act more forcefully because he has more and better forces at his command. Vietnam has nothing to do with it, not because the President came of age that much later but because he became President after technological and tactical advances had improved the reliability and effectiveness of drones and special ops to the deadly degree they’ve now achieved. When President Clinton went after Osama bin Laden he had to throw cruise missiles at him and hope that bin Laden didn’t see them coming and was still in the general vicinity when they arrived. President Obama had the option of sending a single, small drone that would have fired a pencil-sized missile to kill bin Laden. He chose not to because there’d have then been no body left to prove to the world that we’d gotten him. When President Carter ordered the attempt to rescue the hostages in Iran, the military practically had to invent the kind of commando unit that has since evolved into the Seals and Delta Force. On the night Seal Team Six went into Abbottabad, about a dozen similar missions were underway in Afghanistan, Waziristan, and Yemen.

However the Vietnam War might have shaped their characters and thinking, the fact seems to be that both President Clinton’s and President Obama’s approaches to using military force were mainly based on the diplomatic and military exigencies of the specific moments when they had to make their decisions.

My point isn’t that Bergen doesn’t know what he’s talking about. It’s that here it doesn’t appear he’s talking about what he knows. He’s writing about something he thinks and passing it along as if it’s something he knows.

It happens. And if it happens to someone like Bergen, a meticulous, diligent, professional journalist of long practice and experience, it could happen to anyone. It does happen to anyone. It happens to anyone who writes and argues for a living. Most political analysis, op-ed writing, and blogging is a matter of passing along thoughts as if they are facts. It’s a hazard of the job. The writing’s often done in a rush. We have deadlines. We have other commitments. We have colds, backaches, stomach bugs, ulcers, mosquito bites, the flu. There isn’t time to check and re-check every little fact. Maybe we do a quick google. Maybe we run down to the library or reach over to the bookshelf to pull down one book, scan the index, skim a chapter or two. Maybe we do the most unreliable thing of all and ask a colleague or a friend, “Hey, does this sound right to you?” Mainly, though, we rely on our memories of stored facts. And we pride ourselves on our memories. “I have a head for the facts,” we brag to ourselves. “If it’s in here,” we say, mentally tapping our foreheads, “It’s in there for a reason.” The reason being that smart guys and gals like us wouldn’t bother to remember it---wouldn’t bother to know it---if it wasn’t true.

To the consternation, chagrin, and infuriation of the Washington Press Corps, one of the goods the rise of blogging did was spread news that critics of political journalism had been trying to get across for decades---there’s a narrative. Journalists don’t go out and uncover stories as much as they go out and cover the story they’ve already told themselves over lunch or at parties or while passing time on the campaign bus. And that story is concocted out of a shared store of memories of past campaign narratives, skimmed articles and books, retold conversations with “reliable” sources, lessons drawn from high school and college history and political science classes twenty, thirty, and forty years in the past now, shopworn anecdotes, received opinions, badly digested polls, gossip, the plots of movies and television shows, alcohol-fueled flashes of insight, untested and unthought-through theorizations and sudden inspirations by people who haven’t had a decent night’s sleep in a week, facts everybody knows---a fact being something everybody on hand knows to be a fact without having to check it with Siri---the occasional, actual fact, and even some intelligent and original reporting uninfluenced by the narrative.

It doesn’t matter how smart, how skeptical, how diligent, how intellectually disciplined any individual reporters are. For almost all of them, including the best, their chief research tool is some explicit or implicit variation of the question, “Does this sound about right to you?”

Naturally, members of the press corps have not been happy to have had this pointed out. Naturally, many denizens of the blogosphere have been more than happy to do the pointing out.

But bloggers concoct their own narratives too and out of the same sort of gumbo of shared memories and “facts”. (Don’t get me started on the influence of The West Wing on the the left side of the bandwidth’s understanding of how politics works.) We like to think we’re dealing in facts, that even when we’re just giving an opinion, we’ve got the facts to back us up. But, really, when it comes down to it, we’re just telling stories.

This isn’t because we’re just as bad as the Beltway Insiders. It’s because we’re just as human.

This is how human beings think.

People don’t naturally or easily think in carefully constructed debating points or in bar graphs or mathematical proofs. We think in stories. And when we debate, discuss, argue, or exchange ideas, we exchange stories, although sometimes we do it at the top of our lungs or through clenched teeth.

We may have facts to back ourselves up, numbers, math, science. But we don’t usually use them. Instead, we tell stories about there being these facts. We tell stories about how other people have gathered and interpreted them. And these stories aren’t even stories we’ve created ourselves. They’re stories we’ve been told, almost always by people who were told them by others who were told…you get the idea.

The personal narratives that make up out thinking are made up of twice-told tales and received opinions.

We didn’t think a lot of what we think we think. We just heard it someplace.

Many people will read Manhunt and not even have that paragraph register. It registered with me because of my prejudice. But others will take it in without a second thought, because they already know it, know what I mean? Others will read it and it will lodge in their brain because it tracks with something they know from somewhere else or because it confirms one of their prejudices. And others will read it and nod and file it away in a mental drawer because, well, Peter Bergen put it in his book and he wouldn’t have put it in there if it wasn’t true, would he?

And at some point, somewhere, these facts will be passed along, in an op-ed, in another book, in a blog post, in an argument in a bar. Bill Clinton was skittish about using force because of his draft dodging youth during the Vietnam War. Barack Obama has no qualms about it because his cohort of late Baby Boomers was spared having to worry about the war.

Now here’s the thing.

I’m fairly certain that Bergen is passing along an opinion up in that paragraph. And I’m willing to bet it’s not his opinion. I mean that it’s not original with him. It’s something he heard somewhere. After all, it’s based on something I’ve heard somewhere. We’ve all heard it. Many times. I’m not certain he doesn’t know that’s what he’s doing. He opens with a seemingly cautionary “perhaps,” but that might be hedging. Still, he may have sources that back him up, interviews with President Clinton or President Obama or with people close to them who know to what degree Vietnam figured in their decisions. I’m surprised he doesn’t list Clinton’s autobiography in his bibliography, but how smart am I to trust a politician to give a straight-forward, non-self-serving version of any event in his career?

I know, because he’s said it many times, that Clinton still feels guilty over his failure to intervene in Rwanda. It could be that in describing how he handled Bosnia he’s implicitly excusing how he didn’t handle Rwanda. He could be trying to polish his legacy by balancing off a failure with a success. And if Vietnam did figure in his thinking as a drag on his willingness to use force, how certain is it he would know it? Perhaps he was not conscious of it and still wasn’t when he sat down to write My Life.

And then that paragraph of Bergen’s seems to be contradicted by points Mark Bowden makes in The Finish, but, although, like I said, a reason I trust the overall factuality of Manhunt is that it tracks with the story as Bowden tells it in The Finish, a reason I trust what’s in The Finish is that I had the story confirmed by having immediately followed up reading it with Manhunt.

And another reason I trust what’s in The Finish is that I read and enjoyed and trusted other books by Bowden. Black Hawk Down. Killing Pablo. The Best Game Ever. And that last one I trusted because it expanded upon a story I already knew from a comic strip I read in Boy’s Life when I was around eight or nine.

So I don’t trust Bergen on this. But I can’t trust Clinton either. And I probably shouldn’t trust Bowden as much as I do. In short, I don’t know enough to know Bergen is wrong. I only know enough to make think he might be.

It’s possible Bergen doesn’t know what he’s talking about. But it’s even more possible that I don’t either.

Possible?

Probable.

But this is what marks me as a card-carrying member of the Reality-based Community and helps pay my dues.

A healthy dose of self-skepticism and a, I hope, cheerful willingness to be proven wrong.

End of Part Three. Part Four on the way. Yes, there’s going to be a Part Four. But that should be it. I appreciate your putting up with this. I’ve had a logjam of posts in my head and I need to write my through this to unjam it.

At the doctor’s office. Short old woman wearing a plastic rain bonnet and leaning on a cane, talking to the receptionist: “Next month it’ll be thirteen years since my husband’s death. Yeah, April 13th he’ll be dead thirteen years. He died of a heart attack. And it’s funny. When he was working he was never sick. He was only seventy, and I’m going to be eighty-five.”

This is Part Two of Three Four. Part One is here. Moment of self-doubt here. Based on some of the comments on Part One, I feel like I have to point out that, although I’m being critical, skeptical, and a bit cynical, I am working my way towards a defense of the Reality-based Community.

Kevin Drum knows stuff.

Everybody who reads his blog knows this. Of course he knows stuff. And he thinks about stuff. He’s a smart and thoughtful guy.

Sometimes, though, he mixes up what he thinks with what he knows.

Happens to the best of us.

Happens to the rest of us.

Happens to the me of us more than I would like or like to admit.

Sheryl Sandberg has written a book. Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. Sandberg is the Chief Operating Officer of Facebook. When Mark Zuckerberg says jump, Sandberg makes sure everybody jumps the right height and the right distance in the right direction and comes down on the right spot. Among other things, her book offers advice to women on asserting themselves at the office. The world needs more women in positions of influence and power, and Sandberg believes that if young women follow her example at least some of them will rise to those positions and from there they can help make the world jump to a better place.

At least, I think that’s what’s in her book. I don’t know. I haven’t read it. I have read a lot about it. Mostly by women who didn’t like what Sandberg had to say in her book. Or rather what they thought she had to say. Most of them hadn’t read Lean In. It hadn’t been released yet.

Boiled down, it seemed to me, their main objection was that, as far as they knew, Sandberg hadn’t written the sort of book they thought she should have written.

Other women came to Sandberg’s defense. Sandberg had the right to write any sort of book she wanted, they said, not that they knew what sort of book she’d written either. They hadn’t read it for the same reason the first set of women hadn’t. But they were pretty sure that whatever Sandberg had written, there was a message in it that needed to be taught and Sandberg was just the person to teach it.

What it came down to, though, was that both sides were made up of a lot of smart and thoughtful people who knew what was in a book they hadn’t read.

I noticed that the actual release of the book wasn’t followed by many blog posts, op-eds, or reviews in which writers on either side revised their initial judgments or stepped up to declare how right they’d been.

Probably this was because editors and producers decided the subject had been pretty well exhausted already. No more page views in it. No ratings increases.

But I knew better.

I knew that what had happened was that people in both groups realized that Lean In turned out to be what it always sounded like to me, another version of a sort of memoir a certain type of reader can’t get enough of, another How to be Me by a corporate careerist preaching a gospel of self-aggrandizement and self-enrichment through climbing the corporate ladder, this one being a little different in that the author appears to have more of a social conscience and more self-awareness than the usual perpetrators of these straight to the remainder table soporifics.

See, I knew what was in the book already too.

At any rate, as far as I know, Kevin Drum hasn’t presumed to know what’s in Lean In without having read it.

Norah O'Donnell: You know, Sheryl, people are going to say, "Oh she's got a charmed life, She went to Harvard. She's a billionaire."

Sheryl Sandberg: Yep.

Norah O'Donnell: "And she's telling me what I should do?" Do they have a point?

Sheryl Sandberg: I'm not trying to say that everything I can do everyone can do. But I do believe that these messages are completely universal.

....Norah O'Donnell: And for those who say, "Easy for you to say?"

Sheryl Sandberg: It is easier for me to say this. And that's why I'm saying it.

Can you imagine anyone posing questions like these to Richard Branson or Jack Welch? Last I looked, they were pretty rich too, and they've also written bestselling books providing advice on business and life. Nobody ever asks them why they think they can offer advice to the masses from their lofty perches, but apparently it feels natural to ask Sandberg these questions just because her primary audience is other women…

Makes sense to me. Except…

These are exactly the sort of questions guys who write the sort of book Sandberg appears to have written get asked. They’re old standards. The first question even the most gullible customer lining up at the wagon to buy the snake oil asks is How do I know this will work for me?

All those guys must have been asked variations of that question every time they sat down for an interview.

Of course I don’t know this. I don’t have the transcripts handy and my memory doesn’t serve because, as I’m sure I’ve made clear, the subject bores me silly so any memory I have of those guys being interviewed is a memory of when for some reason or another I couldn’t change the channel. Even so, my memory is pretty good, but it’s not so good I can remember every question asked and answered in every interview I caught in passing God knows how long ago.

And I’d bet it’s the same for Drum.

I doubt he has the transcripts handy either. If he did any googling, he’d have probably put it in his post. His memory may be way better than mine, but it’s probably not that good. And, in fact, since he’s only human, whatever memory he does have of any of those interviews has probably been…emended…by the assumption that questions like that wouldn’t have been asked.

We’re very good at “remembering” what it’s convenient for us to remember.

Drum's post isn’t a statement of something he knows. It’s just something he thinks.

He has good reason to think it, based on things he and we do know.

We know women in the public eye are subjected to different standards. We know they are patronized, that their opinions are trivialized and marginalized, we know they’re treated (and dismissed) as more emotional and reactive than men, as less logical, less practical, less intelligent. We know that if they are young and attractive, like Sandberg, they’re sexualized and in that way demeaned and dismissed as unserious. We know that women who resist this sexualization, either deliberately and consciously or because they just don’t fit the prevailing standards for sexy, are blamed and derided, insulted, mocked, and openly despised and attacked as if it’s their job and their responsibility to be young, pretty, charming, deferential, and willing to at least give the impression they’re open to, you know, the possibility.

We know women are discriminated against generally and more specifically on the job. We know they are denied promotions, raises, and perks that their male coworkers receive as a matter of course. We know they’re expected to defer to their bosses and take orders without complaint in a way the men around them aren’t and wouldn’t stand for. We know they have their ideas stolen when they aren’t outright dismissed. We know they’re harassed and we know that harassment isn’t about sex, it’s about asserting male dominance and often the goal is to drive them from the workplace.

We know all this happens.

And we know it happens not just in the business world but in areas that ought to be and routinely congratulate themselves on being more enlightened---academia, the sciences, the arts, the comic book and gaming communities, the liberal blogosphere.

But how do we know it?

We know because we’ve seen it happen. The women among us have had it happen to them, time and time again. The men among us have watched it happen. Sometimes we’ve even made it happen or let it happen by not speaking up or by not even noticing. All of us have read about it. Heard about it. There are studies! I can’t point to any at the moment. I don’t have any copies handy. I can’t remember any specifics. But I’ve read them or at least read about them, so I know they’re there and I know what they show.

So we know!

And if it happens in that many other cases, then we can assume it’s happening in this one.

Probably.

Maybe.

It’s a good bet, at least.

Anyway, if it’s not happening here, it happens often enough that it might as well be, so I’m not really wrong if I talk about it as if it is happening even if I don’t know that it is.

Right?

Here’s the thing.

Much of what we know, we don’t know, we just believe. We accept it, usually without thought.

There may be lots of good reasons for believing it, but that doesn’t change what’s going on. We’re treating an opinion as if it’s a self-evident fact.

We do this. By we I mean people. Our thinking is lazy and besides there are only so many hours in the day. If we had to think everything through we’d never get out the door in the morning. We have to make decisions based on what we know, even though we know that a lot of what we know we don’t really know. We just assume.

And we have bad habits of mind. We over-privilege our own experiences. We are all subject to confirmation bias. We treat coincidence as causation. (That last one’s the basis of all religion.) We reflexively defend our egos and argue not about what’s happening but about what we want to happen or need to be happening to flatter our vanities and advance our self-interests.

And those of us who are politically minded have the really bad habit of applying our political beliefs as if they are scientific theories, proven beyond question and universally descriptive and prescriptive.

What Kevin Drum saw happening in that 60 Minutes interview with Sandberg might very well have been happening, but not in the way he thinks. It might not have been in the questions themselves that the double-standard was being applied against Sandberg but in O’Donnell’s tone or in her attitude or in her eyes. It might have been in a single, quick nod of the head or raising of an eyebrow or recrossing of a leg. Drum might have seen right but assumed wrong.

His assumption being that he knew what was going on based on stuff he remembered and not on what he was seeing and hearing at the moment, privileging his base of knowledge over his own instincts, a common mistake among intellectuals and another form of temptation for members of the reality-based community.

We don’t just think that because we respect the facts we have the facts. We think that if we think something, believe something, know something it must be based on our stored knowledge of the facts.

It can’t be based on something so fleeting as a casual observation or---ha!---a momentary impression.

Can it?

End of Part Two. Don’t worry I’m getting there. Part Three is on the way.

But I didn’t learn about him only from that Vanity Fair article. I was reading Robert Sullivan’s My American Revolution, an enjoyable, John McPhee style exploration of the landscapes of New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania where the main action of the War for Independence was concentrated. Sullivan looks at what’s there now, tells about what was there then, and chronicles what happened in between. For the chapter I read last night, he visited the spot on the Delaware River where Washington and his troops pushed off from to begin their assault on Trenton. Sullivan writes about the copy of Emanuel Leutze’s iconic painting of Washington Crossing the Delaware displayed in the museum there and about the yearly re-enactment of the crossing and in between he writes about Rivers and his painting Washington Crossing the Delaware, which I’d never seen or even heard of.

Now that our hero has come back to us in his white pants and we know his nose trembling like a flag under fire, we see the calm cold river is supporting our forces, the beautiful history.

To be more revolutionary than a nun is our desire, to be secular and intimate as, when sighting a redcoat, you smile and pull the trigger. Anxieties and animosities, flaming and feeding

on theoretical considerations and the jealous spiritualities of the abstract the robot? they're smoke, billows above the physical event. They have burned up. See how free we are! as a nation of persons.

Dear father of our country, so alive you must have lied incessantly to be immediate, here are your bones crossed on my breast like a rusty flintlock, a pirate's flag, bravely specific

and ever so light in the misty glare of a crossing by water in winter to a shore other than that the bridge reaches for. Don't shoot until, the white of freedom glinting on your gun barrel, you see the general fear.

And that was the second poem by Frank O’Hara I read yesterday. I read the first much earlier in the day, while noodling about the internet, reading stuff that had nothing to do with Larry Rivers, George Washington, or even Frank O’Hara.

I am not a painter, I am a poet. Why? I think I would rather be a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg is starting a painting. I drop in. "Sit down and have a drink" he says. I drink; we drink. I look up. "You have SARDINES in it." "Yes, it needed something there." "Oh." I go and the days go by and I drop in again. The painting is going on, and I go, and the days go by. I drop in. The painting is finished. "Where's SARDINES?" All that's left is just letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of a color: orange. I write a line about orange. Pretty soon it is a whole page of words, not lines. Then another page. There should be so much more, not of orange, of words, of how terrible orange is and life. Days go by. It is even in prose, I am a real poet. My poem is finished and I haven't mentioned orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES

Frank O’Hara I did know about.

But I didn’t recall having read either of those poems.

And I didn’t know he was considered a brilliant art critic or that he worked at the Museum of Modern Art or that he was friends with Larry Rivers (which, how could I, since I didn’t know Larry Rivers was there to be friends with).

So I learned a lot of stuff yesterday.

About Larry Rivers. About Frank O’Hara. About George Washington. About the American Revolution. About the New York School. About hanging out at the Cedar Tavern in the 1950s and about how drinking there was different from drinking at the White Horse Tavern.